BIDS Helper
Open-knowledge reference entry
BIDS Helper is a Visual Studio open source extension with multiple features that extend and enhance business intelligence development functionality in all editions of Microsoft's SQL Server 2005, 2008, 2008 R2 and 2012. BIDS Helper improves the development environment for integration, analysis and reporting services. BIDS Helper is hosted on GitHub.
History
BIDS Helper was initially released on May 27, 2007. BI Developer Extensions for Visual Studio 2015, 2017 and 2019 is published in the Visual Studio Gallery.
The last version for SQL 2005 (Visual Studio 2005), SQL 2008 (Visual Studio 2008), SQL 2008 R2 (Visual Studio 2008), BIDS Helper 1.7.0 was released on March 17, 2015.
In Version 1.5, released on June 7, 2011, Varigence contributed key portions of the Biml engine, including dynamic package generation to BIDS Helper. Business Intelligence Markup Language (Biml) is an XML-based language that allows a developer to describe a BI solution in a declarative fashion, similarly to using HTML to describe how a web page should appear. Version 1.5 also had the Expression Editor contributed by Konesans.
Features
BIDS Helper has dozens of features that improve the functionality of BIDS, SSIS and SSAS. They are classified into one of five categories listed below based on where they increase functionality in SQL Server:
Analysis Services Multidimensional
Aggregation Manager - an advanced interface for manually editing aggregations
Calculation Helpers - enhances the Calculations tab of the cube editor
Column Usage Reports - opens two reports about column usage: Unused Columns Report + Used Columns Report
Delete Unused Aggregations - automates the process of detecting which aggregations are unused and deleting them
Deploy Aggregation Designs - deploys just the aggregation designs in a cube.
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This entry incorporates text from “BIDS Helper” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.